Interesting read on stills and motion

The Cloud is Falling

So is the answer for photographers is to pick up a video camera? Should we all produce audio slide shows?

Well - maybe. While there is ABSOLUTELY no doubt that every photographer out there should be actively developing their video shooting and editing skills today and learning it at their schools/universities - I do have some important reservations and concerns to point out.

Oblivion

lens culture: David Maisel

Certain spatial fears seem endemic to the modern metropolis, and Los Angeles defines this term in ways that no other American city can approximate. This amorphous skein of strip malls, gated developments, highway entrances and exit ramps, lays unfurled over the landscape like a sheet over a cadaver. Surely the earth is dead beneath the sheer weight and breadth of this built form?

Read and learn

Histogram Basics

Arguably, histograms are the most useful tool available in digital photography. At the same time it may also well be the least understood.

Never trust your monitor. Never trust your laptop on location in the middle of a desert in direct sunlight. Never trust the LCD on the back of your camera.

Always trust the histogram.

The numbers, they don't lie.

I use this on the GIMP

Liquid Resize Liquid Resize is a "content aware" image resizing application for Mac OS X and Windows. Liquid Resize is now available for download as a Product Preview from onOne Software.

Gonna give it a whirl nowas a OSX demo.

Annoying

One of the most frustrating things about being a retoucher is that clients don't believe you when you tell them you can do something and then won't believe you when you tell them something else is impossible. ....sigh.

Retoucher in the New yorker

The World of Fashion: Pixel Perfect: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Retouchers, subjected to endless epistemological debates—are they simple conduits for social expectations of beauty, or shapers of such?—often resort to a don’t-shoot-the-messenger defense of their craft, familiar to repo guys and bail bondsmen. When I asked Dangin if the steroidal advantage that retouching gives to celebrities was unfair to ordinary people, he admitted that he was complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body, but said, “I’m just giving the supply to the demand.” (Fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements.)

Fun.

Tracked Shots on Equatorial Mountings

One axis of this mount, called the "polar axis" aligns parallel to the Earth's axis and a motor and gear turn the scope around this axis at the exact same rate that the Earth turns so that an object in the sky stays stationary in the telescope.

This type of mounting allows the telescope and camera to track or exactly follow the sky as the stars appear to move across the sky as the Earth turns underneath them.

An equatorial mounting that is correctly polar aligned can track on the stars to allow exposures of many minutes. A camera with a normal lens can be mounted "piggyback" on top of the telescope and wide angle, normal, and short telephoto focal length shots taken while the mounting tracks the stars.

How to process .fff files without FlexColor


UFRaw - Home

The Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads raw images using Dave Coffin's raw conversion utility - DCRaw. UFRaw supports color management workflow based on Little CMS, allowing the user to apply ICC color profiles. For Nikon users UFRaw has the advantage that it can read the camera's tone curves. Even if you don't own a Nikon, you can still apply a Nikon curve to your images. My guiding concept in the development of UFRaw is to give all the essential (and some non-essential) information and control over the raw conversion, with the hope that one could resolve all the exposure and white balance issues during the raw conversion. The obvious advantage is that one can make full use of the raw data. The provisional advantage is that this way we circumvent the current 8-bit limitation of the Gimp, as UFRaw does all manipulations in 16-bits.

I spent a good part of today trying to find a way to process Hasselblade's fucking 3f format. The good old GIMP comes in handy again!

Hmm.... interesting


A Camera for the Shot You Missed - New York Times

But this Casio can snap — are you ready for this? — 60 photos a second. These are not movies; these are full six-megapixel photographs, each with enough resolution for a poster-size print. After such a burst, you’re offered three options: delete all 60 shots, keep all 60, or review them and pluck out the individual frames worth keeping. The whole batch begins to play like a flip-book movie; you control playback with a back-panel control dial. As you watch, you press the shutter button once to identify each frame you want to keep; the rest will be discarded.

Epson FYI


Epson America, Inc. - Support - Highlights

The following Epson drivers are for use with Apple Macintosh OS 10.5 - 10.5.x. These drivers are offered for public beta testing only, so Epson provides them "as is," without any warranty, support or liability of any kind. Final release of these drivers is expected to be Q1 of 2008. These Epson Leopard drivers are all new. They are being designed to take advantage of the latest technologies introduced with the Leopard OS. One major feature is the 16-bit printing path. We are designing the drivers to function so that if you are printing 16-bit files from 16-bit capable printing applications, the data remains untouched in native 16-bit form as it arrives into the Epson printer driver for color and screening processing.

LifePixel Digital Infrared Photography IR Conversion, Modification & Scratched Sensor Repair

With the advent of digital cameras it is now possible to photograph infrared light with your digital camera and greatly simplify the infrared photography process. The latest digital cameras are sensitive to infrared light, so much so that manufacturers place a hot mirror filter in front of the sensor to block infrared light to prevent infrared IR light from spoiling regular photographs. It is still possible to shoot digital infrared photography with an unmodified digital camera but the exposures become quite long and in most cases require a tripod, not to mention the need to place an infrared filter in front of the lens to block visible light. All this sure doesn't help the creative infrared photography process. With our digital infrared photography conversion it is now possible to photograph infrared images hand held at low ISO speeds and without the need for infrared filters. Since you no longer need to use an infrared filter in front of the lens it is much easier to change lenses, compose and focus.

Maybe I won't sell that old D20 after all......

Elinchrom Skyport Puts Control in Remote Triggering


Elinchrom Skyport Puts Control in Remote Triggering "The Elinchrom Skyport provides wireless triggering of any pc-corded flash and complete wireless control of Elinchrom RX units. Even non-Elinchrom strobes can be made to perform some new tricks, when used with the computer-controlled modules.

The Skyport is a new, miniaturized, ultra secure, high speed data transmission system providing hand held or computer wireless control of all Elinchrom RX power units. By connecting your camera, flash, or even your computer to the various modules, you can change what features are available. You can select from 4 basic modules: Transmitter, Universal Receiver, RX Receiver, Transceiver RX USB.

The Transceiver RX USB plugs into your computer’s USB port and can control all the modules in the system. The included software lets you store various configurations along with a diagram of the shooting layout."

Wow, nice. One method lets you ru nit from the trigger on cam and another lets you run the whole show from your computer with a USB dongle. It's around $200 for the kit with no lights. Not bad.